Temporary People, Permanent Evolution
I am not a people person. They don't warm up to me fast enough, and honestly — I don't particularly like them either. I don't feel I belong to their species. They exhaust me in ways I can't always explain. My relationship with humans is, in a nutshell, complicated.
That said, I have a few. A small, rotating few who connect to me genuinely — and that circle shifts every few years depending on where our cycles align. Because we are not here to collect people like furniture and keep them forever. We are here to evolve, to grow, to change directions, paths, and yes — people. Stagnation is death in every form. Stop moving and you die. Stop evolving and you die. Stop growing and you die. Stagnation dressed as stability is still decay.
But this is not really about me. This is about a girl I watched on vacation.
She was nineteen. Sitting at a table, phone propped in front of her like a second face, earphones in both ears, sealed off from the world with impressive efficiency. She had two friends with her — people she had met through an app, strangers she was still in the process of evaluating. Not friends from birth, not friends from years of shared experience. Friends from an algorithm that decided they might be compatible. She wasn't sure yet if they actually were. Neither were they.
I had to pull a conversation out of her like someone extracting something stuck. And what came out was interesting — genuinely, there was a mind in there. But every piece of information she offered came from TikTok or Instagram. Not one reference to a book, a historical event, a conversation she'd had with someone older, a lesson learned the hard way. The music she listened to was AI-generated or ambient background noise engineered for productivity. The food she ate came in boxes — ultra-processed, genetically modified, loaded with salt and manufactured flavour. And when I asked about real food, she told me she was allergic. To wheat. To eggs. To milk. To the things humans have eaten since the beginning of human history. Her body, at nineteen, already rejecting what nature made for it.
I sat there watching her and thought — this is not her fault. This is the product. This is what they built. What we allowed by obedience.
Because the disconnection didn't happen by accident. It happened by design — layer by layer, system by system. The food laboratories replaced nutrition with addiction. The screens replaced presence with stimulation. The political lies replaced history with approved narratives. The medical system replaced prevention with dependency. Even the atmosphere has been altered — and now we are told the sun itself, the thing that sustained every living being on this planet since its beginning, is killing us. Stay inside. Wear protection. Avoid the very source of life that kept humanity alive for millennia. The system has now successfully made nature the enemy.
And a generation grew up inside all of that — not knowing anything different existed.
I have been moving my whole life. Countries, people, patterns — always shifting. In the eyes of the world that made me unstable, untrustworthy, not worth the social investment. But in my solitude I found something they didn't expect — a deeper understanding of human nature, of what real connection actually looks and feels like. My solitude gave me emotional intelligence and a fullness I never found in a crowded room.
And from that quiet place I observed. What I saw everywhere, not just in that girl, was people who had lost connection — with themselves, with nature, with god, with each other. And the further they walked from real connection, the more they reached for replacements. Objects first. Then imaginary things. Then plastic things. Then screens. Then strangers on applications. Then AI voices in their ears telling them what to feel. By the time they realise how far they've walked down the path of nothingness, there is no clear way back. They don't even remember what they were walking away from.
Generation after generation becomes socially impaired. Physical presence becomes uncomfortable. Real conversation has to be extracted. History disappears under manufactured narrative until people lose their grip on reality entirely — on what actually happened, on whether life was ever different, on whether it could ever be again. Crazy becomes normal. Algorithms become companions. Ratings become survival. Boxes become food. And the human being — warm, searching, imperfect, real — becomes an outdated model.
I am also grieving. Not just for that girl, not just for the world — but for every version of myself I've had to leave behind to keep moving forward. I am grieving all the people I was. And somewhere out there, others are grieving her too — the girl they knew, the one they loved, the one they built memories around. They want her back so they can feel alive again. But that girl cannot stay. She ignites things, changes direction, lights fires — and moves. It is not cruelty. It is the only way she knows how to survive.
When I look at my son — so connected, so full of love, so completely present in a way that breaks my heart with its beauty — I feel the weight of all of this most sharply. Because I know that one day he will reach for that kind of warmth and find it harder to locate in the world he is inheriting. He will have to adapt. He will find his version of the girl at the table, the earphones, the app friends, the box food — and it will simply be his normal. Something will always feel faintly missing inside him, a warmth he once knew but cannot name. I hope that feeling becomes his compass. The buried memory that quietly guides him toward a different path when the system tells him there is only one way to live.
So my path continues. Temporary people, temporary pleasures, temporary intellectual connections — enough to stay alive inside. And I don't say temporary with bitterness. I say it with honesty. Because the real question underneath all of this is not why I keep moving. The question is — how do you evolve and stay rooted at the same time? How do you grow, shed what no longer fits, and still hold on to what is real, what is natural, what was always yours? How do you look at a nineteen-year-old girl eating alone at a table with earphones in and two app-friends she isn't sure about yet — and not feel the specific grief of knowing exactly what was taken from her, and when, and by whom?
I am not disloyal. I am not unstable. I am not incapable of love or connection.
I am just someone who remembers what connection felt like before they redesigned it. And I can't pretend I don't. And it hurts.